Date of Submission

Spring 2013

Academic Program

Psychology

Project Advisor 1

Stuart Levine

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Previous research indicates that East Asians tend to pay more attention to contextual, peripheral information than Westerners. In my current project, I explored the cultural variation in aesthetic preferences of framing in photographs. The Photograph-taking Task investigated how different people from diverse cultural backgrounds frame in photographs. The Embedded Figure Task examined participants’ cognitive styles in terms of the degree to which an individual has difEiculty analyzing a Eigure independently of its Eield. The results suggest that (a) American participants are more Eield-independent and tend to largely focus on the target object, whereas East Asian participants are more Eield-dependent and attend more to the contextual or background information, and (b) the first photograph taken by the subjects is the best indication of the influence of cultural variance on framing in the field. These findings can be explained further by the relationships among attention, self-concept, cultural influence and perception.

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